3 Reasons Your Business Change Fails
Photo by Mark Fletcher Brown on Unsplash
Often organizations are in such a hurry to change things that they miss critical analysis questions of the change itself.
"70% of change initiatives fail to achieve their objective". You see this statement a lot often in terms of change management or leading change in general. Usually, the message identifies poor change management as the culprit.
After more than two decades in both planning and leading change, I've seen a ton of reasons why projects fail to reach their objectives. Poor change planning is only one, albeit a big one, but there are other reasons a change initiative might fail.
The following are the precursor to planning and potentially more significant to consider.
Problem Solving
Change and transition happen over and over in every business. We constantly evolve and must keep pace with the technology that continually changes our business capabilities and environments.
As this happens, a process or tool becomes outdated or needs to advance an area within the company. We start to consider which solutions will best achieve the required new result.
All very straightforward.
Now usually, people are assigned to the task of finding that solution. Often it’s leaders or a team of people in smaller companies who directly understand the day-to-day business needs. In large companies, teams with direct expertise would be assigned.
To illustrate with an example, suppose the issue is workflow efficiency in accounting. The current software cannot meet the growing demands logistically and technically. In this case, you might see the IT & Accounting team tapped to solve the issue.
It's critical to ensure that someone in the teams above knows how to lead the problem-solving process. If you don't have this or, even worse, leadership has already decided the software is the issue that needs solving; you are potentially solving the wrong problem. The problem-solving group is considering the wrong issue.
The first step is determining what the actual problem is. You might need a different group to contribute, depending on the issue or symptoms. If you are part of the group, it's vital to be curious at the start by digging deeply in symptom assessment to find or confirm the actual problem.
A talent management example:
Senior leaders look at engagement and performance, see low results, and immediately assess the cause as being a lack of leadership training and development.
They pull a group of people with expertise in training and development and ask them to build a solution. Fast forward to the solution implementation, and they struggle to get engagement and traction from the training.
Even with high training attendance, they experience little to no change in the metrics initially used to assess it as a problem.
A critical look into the issue finds the actual problem: managers and supervisors in the organization had very little visibility to its objectives. They didn't understand how to engage their teams to achieve results towards it.
Had the senior leaders started by correctly identifying the problem to be solved, they could have resolved the issue much quicker and at half the expense.
Change consultants experience this frequently when they are engaged to plan the behavior change for a project. They find that partway into the process, the solution driving the change is incorrect. It's a devastating realization for behavior change design because it's tough to build buy-in when employees know the solution is off the mark out of the gate.
The flip side is also true.
Let's say you've succeeded in identifying the right problem. You assign a team of people well-positioned to find the right solution to the problem. Except this group is not the right group for all kinds of reasons.
They could be out of touch with the day-to-day business needs or under-resourced and unable to spend quality time on the process. Or worse, they are not respected by their peers or perceived as a knowledgeable resource to solve it.
The risk here is coming up with the wrong solution to the right problem. More common in software changes, training solutions, or even program shifts that miss the mark.
From the change planning perspective, credibility for the solution is often tough to build as the employees dismiss it out of the gate. They tune out when they see the first sign that the new solution misses the core business process or need. Trust erodes. Projects in this situation find themselves with meager adoption rates and, in some cases, must be shelved entirely.
In summary, employees will resist the change or give a half-hearted effort towards it when: your solution is not the right solution, or you have solved the wrong problem.
What’s changing?
Another hurdle that can trip up the planning process is the identification of the change.
Now, let's assume you have done your homework – you've correctly identified your problem. You've selected the best experts on your team to solve it and they come up with a solution that is an excellent fit in every way.
To understand the impact of this solution, you must first identify the type of change it is and what is changing.
Is it a change or transformation? Is it a targeted change that is straightforward and well-defined? Or a more significant transformation provoking multiple changes across the organization to achieve the objective?
These are critical definitions. Each one requires a different set of resources and analysis approaches to plan and execute.
Considerable time and resources consumption occurs in the spin created by this lack of definition. Ultimately when a project moves forward with this undefined, it creates a domino effect in planning, starting with the inability to identify the change impacts. As a result, the implementation is exposed to high resistance and outright refusal when new processes collide with gaps in practicality.
When you approach it as an isolated change and miss that it's part of a broader transformation, you miss interdependencies. You also risk alignment to the larger objective.
When you approach a single change as if it's a transformation, you risk buy-in and engagement. The effort appears to be too broad for the scope of the problem. With more time spent focusing on the overall outcome than is needed, the attention required for execution diminishes.
Moving on
You can have the right solution, correctly identify the change type, and create a successful change plan and execution, but still not achieve your objective.
How is it possible?
Business conditions change during your implementation. More significant changes take time to execute, and transformations almost always take multiple years to reach their objectives.
Said another way, changes to the business outpace the ongoing internal changes. These happen for various reasons: the economy shifts unexpectedly, acquisition and merger occur, a product or technology disruption occurs. The external condition has a fundamental impact on the project objective in flight.
Takeaways
Before you start to plan your initiatives, target your solutions and objectives accurately. Time spent to ensure you're solving the right problem gives you the best chance at coming up with the right solution. These are critical for proper planning.
Understand the type of change your initiative is evoking. Knowing whether it's a transformation or a change gives you the proper planning approach for the behavior side of the change.
And finally, consider the external influences impacting your initiative when assessing whether it was a success or failure. The post-project analysis will be more accurate, allowing lessons learned to improve the next project.
Are you about to embark on a change in your business and would like to leverage change planning experience? Let’s have a conversation.
